Prevention of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases by Broccoli Sourced and Microbially Produced Bioactives.
Presented by Johanna Holman in fulfillment of her Master’s of Science in Nutrition degree at the University of Maine. Jul 25, 2022 09:30 – 10:30 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Register in advance to attend this presentation over Zoom, which will also be held in person in 206 Rogers Hall at the University of Maine (no RSVP required). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
About Johanna
I met Johanna in the fall of 2019, when I was just establishing myself as a new Assistant Professor at UMaine and she was looking for an advisor for a graduate degree. Right away, she impressed me with her background and enthusiasm for research. I learned that Johanna began her undergraduate study as an art student before transitioning fluidly to science. The ability to design visual aids and graphical representations of data is hugely important to science and sadly, not always a skill that scientists are trained to do, and Johanna has made some incredible art for her research.
Once she became a science student during her undergraduate study, she worked in the laboratories of Drs. Yanyan Li, previously an Associate Professor (of nutrition) in the College of Science and Humanities, and Tao Zhang, Assistant Professor of Basic Pharmaceutical Sciences, both of Husson University in Bangor. There, she performed nutritional biochemistry, worked with mouse models, and developed an idea of what she wanted to study in graduate school and pursue as a career. Johanna continues to work closely with both researchers, especially now that Dr. Li has taken a position at UMaine.
Johanna and I continued to plan her graduate work and career goals, she officially joined my lab as a Master’s Student of Nutrition at UMaine in fall 2020, and immediately got to work. Not only did she begin preparations for the massive undertaking that is part of her project, but she began mentoring several undergraduates on and off campus, and started as a first time teaching assistant for the Chemistry department, which required navigating virtual labs. She served as a chemistry TA for academic year 20/21 and 21/22, with up to 60 students per semester. For the last year and a half, she has been coordinating a large-scale research project with investigators at 4 different institutions and undergraduate researchers from 3 different institutions, involving hundreds of samples – while being a masters student, a graduate teaching assistant, and mentoring undergrads in the lab, and all during a pandemic! She managed that all so well, that despite being a first-year graduate student, she was awarded a 2020-2021 University of Maine Graduate Student Employee of the Year award, and the 2022 Norris Charles Clements Graduate Student Award from the College of Natural Sciences, Forestry, and Agriculture.
Johanna’s project focuses on whether consumption of specific broccoli sprout preparations will elicit changes in the gut microbiota, to the effect of improving the production of microbiota-specific bioactives that have local anti-inflammatory effects, and promoting intestinal homeostasis by reducing dysbiosis. Broccoli sprouts represent an effective, and accessible way to add dietary intervention to existing treatment and prevention strategies for IBD patients. This project is a continuation of previous research on bioactive compounds in broccoli, completed in the labs of Drs. Yanyan Li and Tao Zhang at Husson University in Bangor. While some of the work may be similar, the skill set she has gained in her graduate work is entirely new. For the 2020/2021 winter break, Johanna was managing a 40-mouse study looking at DSS-treatment and different preparations of a broccoli sprout diet for 5 weeks, which resulted in hundreds of samples collected, hundreds of data time points, and enough follow-up laboratory and analysis work to keep her occupied for an entire year. She has learned how to culture bacteria in an anaerobic chamber, which is a notoriously fussy machine that requires regular attention, as well as to grow them under different conditions for biochemical analysis and enzyme activity. She is currently learning additional histology skills, DNA extraction, DNA sequencing library preparation, DNA sequence analysis, and more. Recently, she has participated in a pilot study to develop an immunological model of IBD, using IL-10 knockout mice. While IL-10 mice have been used to study IBD, they have never been applied in this way to study the interaction of diet, microbes, and disease.
She has presented this work at the American Society for Microbiology annual meeting, and at the UC Davis Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) symposium, and has several conference presentations planned for 2022. Johanna has an author on a paper in early 2022 for work she contributed to as an undergraduate, and is preparing 3 manuscripts generated from her masters work which will be submitted for peer review at a scientific journal in 2022.
Johanna has been accepted to the Nutrition PhD program at UMaine, and will continue working with Dr. Li and I, as well as the full research team. Based on those preliminary results, Johanna’s doctoral work will focus on developing that new model, synthesizing information from both models, and using those results to develop diet intervention trials in human patients. After her PhD, Johanna intends to conduct research at an institution here in Maine, and to continue her work connecting the biochemistry of nutrition with gut microbiology and human health.